Thursday, October 29, 2009

The Bitch is Back

There is no denying the effect of Rand's writing on teenagers. It's characteristic of propaganda aimed at teenagers. If they only believe in these true principles, they will find their triumphant place in life leaving their worthless competitors in despair! How exhilarating! Thus the emotional hook which fosters belief resistant to criticism, logic, and reality.

This sort of propaganda works on teenagers and other ignorants because they have not yet been vaccinated with enough worldly cynicism, let alone been exposed to more sensible alternatives and counter-arguments.

Even if you are not ignorant, it is difficult to answer Randian "when did you stop beating your wife" assertions that you must believe or you are a looter. The perverse framing is pervasive in Rand's books.

10 comments:

To the best of my knowledge, Rand did not explicitly target teenagers with Atlas Shrugged. The novel shows characters mostly in their 30's and 40's, for example, with conveniently dead parents and no children of their own. However, because Rand apparently didn't emotionally mature herself, she projected her adolescent resentments into her "adult" heroes, namely the sense many teens have that others don't appreciate or respect them, and that reality intends far better things for them.

In my thankfully limited dealings with adult Rand followers,what stands out is the seeming belief that the rest of us should sacrifice our well-being for their advantage, and when we seem a bit reluctant, well, we are just 'looters', etc. When you look at the general lack of talent and the "spoiled child" mentality of many adult Randians, why in God's name would we even want to do them a good turn, much less put ourselves at a disadvantage?

You could be right there, Mark! Actually,when you think about it, there is a touch of the unintentionally camp about the Randians- such a disparity between their self-images and their reality. But then again I'm probably just jealous of their superiority....Ha!

What do Objectivists make of (1) financially successful but obviously stupid people, like a lot of celebrities? and (2) financially successful, intelligent but also religious people, like, say, Mitt Romney? Objectivists claim that the ability to make a fortune through voluntary transactions in the market requires a combination of intelligence, consistent rationality and a code of secular, egoistic morality. If both kinds of people made their fortunes through voluntary transactions in the market, but lack the necessary characteristics for doing so according to Objectivist theory, then how can these individuals exist?

Ah! I would imagine that they would regard such fortunes as a form of looting, i.e an immoral way of aquiring wealth. Something like the way a fundamentalist Christian capitalist would regard a fortune made by pimping or owning a sex shop. You must understand that above all Ayn was a moralist as much as she was a philosopher. BTW, do you think that Ayn Rand's life would make a good musical comedy, with the Brandens as innocents abroad. It could be something like "The Producers" combined with "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf"!

Rand's irony-filled life provides plenty of material for comedy. She wanted to engage "reality," so she went to work in Hollywood and wrote novels; she worshiped "heroic" men of the mind, so she married a handsome but nonintellectual and unsuccessful actor; she taught mind/body integration, so she seldom bathed, never exercised and had trouble with daily practical tasks; she denounced self-sacrifice, so she insisted that Nathaniel Branden continue his sexual relationship with her against his aversion to her unkempt and aging body.

The last irony, BTW, illustrates Greg Nyquist's human nature versus Ayn Rand thesis: Branden apparently displayed the characteristics of an alpha male with his ability to build a "tribe" around himself and Rand. So naturally his evolved alpha male brain rebelled at having to waste sperm cells on a postmenopausal woman when much younger, reproductively fit women showed up to provide these sperm cells with better opportunities.

I see what you mean!Poor Ayn, as I learn more about her I feel a bit sorry for her- just not a lot! She really started to resemble one of those tragi-comic women in Tennesee Williams plays. She had a touch of the funny/sad delusions of Blanche Dubois...

Rand's grievances against the world sound more psychological than economic. Despite the rhetoric about self-esteem and independence from others' judgment, the heroes in her novels seem overly touchy about the way their "lessers" refuse to defer to them as alpha males (or females).

For example, in the The Fountainhead, Roark didn't have a financial grievance against the people who constructed Cortlandt after changing his design. He even let Peter Keating accept the payment and take credit for it. He decided to dynamite the structure because he felt disrespected by the way it turned out, not because the usual suspects deprived him of some of his wealth through force or fraud. He expected people below him in the dominance hierarchy to follow his judgment instead of their, in other words, even though he had submitted his work anonymously through Keating and surrendered his rights to it.

Similarly, in Atlas Shrugged, Hank Rearden's grievance against his family doesn't derive from fact that he has to support them (apparently they couldn't go out to make their own living), but that they didn't express appreciation and respect for him in return.

I always suspected that in "Fountainhead" Roark's 'inferiors' went and changed his plans just to see how far they could piss him off- the changes probably had nothing to do with cost, etc! Anybody who has worked in service industries knows that there are ways to get back at spoiled brat like him...Of course nobody would have thought that he would "go postal" like he did.